There are many applications requiring a rugged, reliable kilovoltmeter with a high electrical impedance and a current drain of the order of 10 microamperes at 25 kilovolts. The present invention can be incorporated in electronic test equipment or can be built into high-voltage power supplies. The present invention draws a negligible current relative to the normally milliampere output of transformer based DC high-voltage power supplies.
Nonaqueous electroosmotic systems are amenable to the study of electrokinetic phenomena in strong electric fields. This point has not been examined extensively in the past, although nonlinear pressure-voltage relationships have been observed in studies at higher voltages than can be conveniently applied to aqueous systems.
Coehn and Raydt studied electrokinetic phenomena in organic systems, but it has since been thought that their results are suspect because the liquids they employed were either shaken with acids before use or were highly impure by present-day standards. Gortner attempted to ascribe electrokinetic effects in nonaqueous systems to a nonionic mechanism. However, La Mer and Downes and Fuoss have shown that ions can exist even in pure hydrocarbon liquids. Stuetzer has observed an electrokinetic effect, termed ion-drag pumping, in pure, low polarity hydrocarbon liquids. Lorenz studied electroosmotic pressure in the quartz-acetone system, but halted the investigation at the level of electric field strengths where the relationship between the pressure and the voltage becomes strongly nonlinear. Lorenz ascribed the nonlinearity to polarization phenomena at the electrodes.
Lauffer and Gortner thought that electrokinetic effects observed in systems comprised of aliphatic alcohols and alumina were due to charges derived from the liquid or the solid, but did not stress the role played by water, particularly at high field strengths. Rastogi and Jha discussed the system consisting of acetone and Pyrex glass sinters in terms of an irreversible thermodynamic treatment using nonlinear coupling constants. Rastogi, Singh, and Singh have discussed the methanol-quartz system in similar terms. Higher order coupling constants were used to obtain expressions which fit the experimental data. References to these publications can be found in "High-Voltage Electroosmosis. Pressure-Voltage Behavior in the System gamma-Alumina-2-Propanol,"A. F. Hadermann, P. F. Waters, and J. W. Woo, J. Phys. Chem., 78, 65 (1974). This publication is incorporated herein by reference.